


In Which the Grand Highblood of Alternia is Reminded of the Dangers of the Corruption of the Mind and the Consequences of Allowing One's Quadrants to Influence One's Decisions.

by locrianrose



Series: Falling stars [2]
Category: Homestuck
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-16
Updated: 2016-05-16
Packaged: 2018-06-08 18:46:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,964
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6869050
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/locrianrose/pseuds/locrianrose
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>You are the Grand Highblood of Alternia, and you fear that you have made a grievous mistake. </p><p>Companion piece to In Which a Doomed Red Romance Runs Its Course.</p>
            </blockquote>





	In Which the Grand Highblood of Alternia is Reminded of the Dangers of the Corruption of the Mind and the Consequences of Allowing One's Quadrants to Influence One's Decisions.

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Azaisya](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Azaisya/gifts).



You’re furious, fuming, when you discover that the task of the tracking and capture of the rustblood was given to her, that they dared to allow someone as low as her help with such a task. It’s not right that she be allowed to work with such a thing, and you’re terrified, deep in your bones that she’ll fall to the heresy that you know the rustblood’s already given in to, and you fear for her first now  

You find her in the interrogation room, and you can’t describe the emotion that you feel when you see her like that, the blood staining her gloves as she stands, small and sharp and everything, but you’re furious and afraid and she should not be here. The troll she’s been trying to convince to talk is sobbing, and you silence him immediately with your chucklevoodoos, taking a moment of care to spare your girl from the terror that leaves him frozen.

“Get out.” The words come out angry, but she glares at you, glasses tilted up so she can meet your eyes from behind them and she looks like she wants to argue but she storms out nonetheless and you’re relieved when she goes, and you don't doubt that she'll bring this up later, when it's safe for you to talk.

The rustblood does talk, eventually, when you drag him to your throne room and you force him to, drawing out the words from him with a mix of fear and pain, and you rest only when you know that he said nothing to her. You kill him then, because you don’t need any more information than that in this moment because you’re relieved but the fear is still there, the doubt that tells you that she’s going to fail as so many others, because no troll of her caste could understand completely and if she discovers that forbidden knowledge then you don’t know if you’d be able to save her, if she'd be worth saving if she fell.

You summon her to you, later. She comes and she’s tired, distracted, but she still provides you with the information that you need and you’re so unbearably flushed for her as she talks to you and tells you what she knows, but the doubt, the new lack of trust in her caused by your own failing is already present and solidified in your mind.

She won’t continue the case, and shouldn’t have been assigned to it in the first place. You put your foot down and she yells at you and the two of you fight, screaming from the privacy of your quarters till she storms away, fuming and angry and in that moment you give what you receive, furious and fuming because she can’t understand and never will. A tealblood can’t understand the cause of the messiahs, can’t comprehend the importance of their plan, and can’t know the wrongness that resides in what’s left of the cause of the troll that they call the Sufferer, how completely and utterly wrong it is and how it'd twist her if she heard it. 

You go to her then, and that day as you lay together, you whisper the words of your sermons to her, praying to the messiahs and hoping against hope that the words will be something that she can comprehend, that she will not be ruined by the rot that you’re certain is attempting to take root in her mind, to render her broken and useless to you, because you cannot stand the thought. It’s in the late hours of the day that you finally whisper to her, words as gentle as you can make them, striving to use your voodoos to make her change her mind, to convince her to repent as gently as you can.

(Later, you’ll wish that you’d forced them into her mind, that you’d dug into the recesses of what she thought and had forced her to repent, but you couldn’t have known then of the rot that’d taken root, couldn’t have known the depth of her betrayal even then.)

She tells you that she needs to care for her lusus. That’s the first thing that she tells you when she sees you again, that she needs to care for the beast. You can’t disagree, telling yourself that this is the test of her faith, if she’s gone or not, and you let her go.

She thinks you don’t know what she’s doing, and as you watch her path, note where she’s traveled you come to the slow and torturous conclusion that she is lost, that the troll who you’d felt so flushed for is fallen, but she is still yours so long as she will come back to you, and you will not ignore this resource while it exists still, even as it burns your blood-pusher to see her too casual betrayal.

You realize now that there is no saving her, that your thinking that she was worth saving was a disservice to the messiahs, and that as much as your blood-pusher yearns for her, she is a traitor and a heretic and no better than the scum that you had killed before. She is less than the dirt of the ground, and killing her or allowing her to be killed at this point would be more of a mercy than anything else, but you will allow her to exist in her betrayal and you will use it as a tool, as a knife that’ll be sharper than the one that her betrayal very nearly could have caught you with.

It’s easy to track her, to plant devices that will allow you to track her betrayal. She goes to the cave, hidden far away in a place where you’d yet to search and in her actions gives you the location of a place and troll that you’d never thought to find otherwise, and when she returns, sharp as ever, you allow her to greet you with affection, but you see how wrong she is now, and that she’s a fool to think that you haven’t seen the pendant that rests on her chest when she sleeps.

It takes effort not to crush her as she lays, to give her the mercy that only you can. Anyone else would draw out her death, force the information from her and break her down into pieces that were usable, but you know that she’s already broken, and the troll who remains is a lost shadow of the troll you knew, and you will not forget it, and again, you will not forsake this tool you’ve been given.

The Empress contacts you again, reminding you of Mindfang, a troll who’d been beneath your notice and tells you that you need to take care of her and you find yourself yearning for your palemate that you’ve been gone from for so long, but you agree and push onwards with the promise of a reunion once it’s all safe again, and once Mindfang is taken care of again. She’s the one who convinces you to give Dualscar an audience, a single offhand comment more than enough to convince you that it’s the thing to do.

It’s a distraction from the problem at hand, but you’ll take it if your palemate asks you to, so you let the seadweller come to your court.

The messiahs dictate your actions when he does, and in a fit of mirth, you ask him for a joke, a tribute to your messiahs and you. He mocks you with his words, speaking a thing that is an insult and you snap after so long of being forced to control yourself, to not harm the one who’d been close to you and you kill him then and there, snapping his bones and destroying him, letting your anger carry you and control your actions.

He’d had a book. Something. It’d allow you to find Mindfang, and you grab it from his body, storming to Redglare and you shove it to her, fury barely controlled and concealed, and you hope that in this she isn’t ruined to you yet as you speak your next words.

“Find her.” You push her towards the door, and the roughness that you now use isn’t that of a matesprit, and you do not care because you want her gone, because you cannot trust yourself not to break her spine now if you’re forced to be in the same room as her for much longer.

You take out your remaining anger on the body that lies before you, every ounce the Grand Highblood that your title dictates you to be, and it does not dissipate for hours.

In the end, you force yourself to go to her rooms. She’s cold and abrupt and so far from the troll you were flushed for, the one who you missed and had lost and it hurts and you want to make her feel that hurt, but you can’t do that yet, because you still need her and that hurts more than anything else because you want to do her that mercy, to wipe her mind clean of all of this and end her, save her from her own weakness. You find pity of a painfully pale shade for the broken thing that she is, and you take her into your arms, and realize that she’s gone now, that the troll you were flushed for is gone and all that remains is broken beyond repair, and you let her go.

You tell her to leave, to take the lusus that she claims to love so, and bring you the head of the Marquise, and then you leave her.

You let go. She is beyond you now, and you renounce your last claims on who she was, because you see that. You’d thought of her as a tool before, but you see that your sentiment had convinced you to allow her to live, and that you have sinned against your messiahs by allowing it. She was a tool, but a filthy one who stained your hands as you used her, and so you plan her death.

She doesn’t kill the Marquise, and brings her back in a move you can only describe as foolish, but in doing so, she gives you a tool for her destruction. It will prevent you from seeing your palemate for a little while longer to execute your plan, but you choose to do it nonetheless. The Marquise will not go easily to her death, so you provide her the tools that she will need to escape it, and after all is said and done and Redglare is dead you go and look, and in the hanging body that is now there you see something of your old matesprit, and you think that this is a mercy for her, and that so long as she is dead it is better than her life.

The pendant that she’d striven to hide is hanging freely now, and you grasp it, breaking it from the chain and leaving her body to rot, now as broken externally as she’d been inside before. The messiahs would find this be fitting justice, that you know, and you allow yourself to laugh at the irony of how things had finally fitted into place.

You make sure that the symbol is destroyed, and you learn from her actions about the weakness of her caste and their lack of strength. Never again will you allow yourself to be swayed from your course, and you will show your repentance to your messiahs through your actions, and you will be stronger than before, and while you will still miss the troll she once was, you will not make the same mistake again.

**Author's Note:**

> For Azaisya, as her comments on 'In Which a Doomed Red Romance Runs Its Course' inspired this and caused it to be written.


End file.
